Jan Bouwens

Jan Bouwens

Professor

Jan Bouwens is a Full Professor of Accounting at the University of Amsterdam and a Research Fellow at Cambridge Judge Business School. His research focuses on performance measurement systems, target setting, and internal controls, examining how these mechanisms influence decision-making within firms and audit practices. He has published extensively in top-tier journals, including The Accounting Review, Journal of Accounting Research, Journal of Accounting and Economics, Management Science, and Accounting, Organizations and Society.Jan earned his PhD in Accountancy from Tilburg University and has held academic positions at Tilburg University, Cambridge Judge Business School, and Harvard Business School, where he taught in the MBA program. He currently serves as Head of the Accounting Department at the University of Amsterdam and until December 2025 Academic Director of the Foundation for Auditing Research (FAR). He has advised the Dutch Parliament, Ministry of Finance, and the Dutch Authority for Financial Markets on topics related to education, compensation, and auditing.

3rd FAR International Conference Proceedings

KEY TAKE-AWAYS

Audit firm culture is viewed by regulators and inspectors as the means to enhance audit quality. This study uses the Competing Values Framework (CVF) to explore the culture of
large audit firms, and their attempts to change their cultures. We find that these firms predominantly emphasize a culture characterized by collaboration and control, which is consistent with an inward focus. We also find that audit firms struggle to implement a consistent understanding of culture across their offices and function levels, and there is a gap in how partners perceive culture compared to that of non-partner staff. This “culture gap” has negative consequences on auditors, as larger culture gaps are associated with lower psychological safety and poorer person organization fit. Embedding mechanisms can lower the culture gap, but having adequate resources is far more important of an embedding mechanism than “tone at the top.” The findings underscore the importance of actively communicating and reinforcing stated cultural values, and provide audit firms with a practical tool to diagnose problems in achieving culture change.

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The first decade of the FAR: past, present and future
This commemorative booklet marks the tenth anniversary of the Foundation for Auditing Research (FAR). It reflects on FAR’s journey as a unique platform where academic research and audit practice meet to advance audit quality. The publication highlights:
  • FAR’s Mission and Impact: How FAR evolved from an ambition into a reality, fostering collaboration between researchers and practitioners through access to real-world audit data.
  • Insights from Leadership: An interview with founding academic director Jan Bouwens and his successor Anna Gold on FAR’s achievements, challenges, and future priorities.
  • Research Highlights: Four featured studies on topics such as auditors’ commercial efforts, student expectations versus auditor experiences, data analytics and professional skepticism, and learning within audit teams.
  • Key Figures and Projects: An overview of FAR’s outputs, including practice notes, masterclasses, conferences, and a growing portfolio of research projects.
The booklet not only looks back with pride but also outlines ambitions for the future of strengthening knowledge transfer, increasing practical usability of research, and deepening engagement across audit firms and academia.
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Performance Measurement, Career Development, and Compensation for Audit Partners
This study examines how Dutch audit firms changed their policies for audit partner performance measurement, career development, and compensation during a period of heightened public scrutiny (2007–2017), and whether those changes translated into day‑to‑day practices. Using proprietary policy documents and partner‑level performance and compensation data from the eight largest audit firms in the Netherlands, the authors find that audit quality became more consequential for promotions, demotions, and job retention, while profit sharing shifted toward longer‑term performance and was complemented by penalties (and claw‑backs) for low quality. Overall, firms appear responsive to public scrutiny, aligning partner incentives more closely with societal expectations of audit quality.
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Moving the audit profession forward – New research and best practices (MAB Issue)
Based on the 3rd International FAR Conference (2018), this special issue of Maandblad voor Accountancy en Bedrijfseconomie (MAB) highlights key insights from the event. The conference, held in June 2018 at Nyenrode Business University, focused on the theme: “Moving the Audit Profession Forward – New Research and Best Practices.” This publication brings together the most important presentations and discussions, offering readers a comprehensive overview of the ideas and developments shared during the conference.  
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Do Assigned Audit Partners Perform Higher Quality Audits Than Self-Selected Auditors?
Auditors are selected and paid for by the organizations they audit. Policymakers are concerned that this structure influences auditor independence which, in turn, impairs quality. Accordingly, policymakers consider whether audit quality is enhanced if the auditor is appointed by an external (independent) party. The authors study the working of such a model in a natural setting for local subsidiary audits conducted by the big-4 as part of group audits, where the local auditor is either assigned to the subsidiary through parent firm management or self-selected by the subsidiary. The authors find that audit partners assigned to subsidiaries receive less information from the auditee, issue fewer going concern opinions, identify fewer control deficiencies, identify and correct fewer misstatements, and are less likely to constrain earnings management compared to self-selected auditors. Some further preliminary evidence the authors collect suggests that assigned auditors produce lower audit quality through effort reduction.
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9 februari 2026

FAR sponsored study published in The Accounting Review

A FAR sponsored study by Olof Bik, Jan Bouwens, Robert Knechel and Yuxia Zou has been accepted for publication in The Accounting Review. This study examines how audit firms changed their policies on audit partner performance measurement, career development, and compensation during a period of heightened public scrutiny of audit quality (2007–2017). It argues that implementing policy changes requires a delicate transition in organizational design and internal processes of firms and that the changes may not automatically translate into day-to-day practices. Access to proprietary performance management policies and individual partner performance and compensation data from the eight largest Dutch audit firms enables an in-depth analysis of the evolution of audit partner performance management. The findings indicate that most policy changes have tangible consequences. In particular, audit quality becomes more influential in career development decisions, while profit sharing is increasingly linked to quality and long-term performance. Overall, the evidence suggests that audit firms respond effectively to public scrutiny by increasingly aligning partner incentives with societal expectations regarding audit quality.
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